This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The major benefit of standard echo-planar imaging (EPI) used for several contrast mechanisms requiring fast imaging is its 'snapshot'capability, which allows one to realign separate EPI images over several directions (diffusion-weighted imaging [DWI]), temporal frames, and/or averages. However, the distortions present in single-shot (ss)-EPI have remained the single most compelling detriment to the advance of this technique in the clinics. The extremely low bandwidth per pixel along the phase-encoding direction in EPI also leads to the development of off-resonance artifacts (e.g. water-fat shift, susceptibility artifacts, eddy current distortions, and B0 shift artifacts) and T2* induced blurring. To speed up k-space traversal, interleaved EPI has been proposed but its sensitivity to motion-related artifacts is well known.